William Byrd

William Byrd was the greatest English composer of his age and one of the supreme figures of the European Renaissance — master of the keyboard, the consort, the madrigal and the church, and the man who all but invented English keyboard music as a serious art. Born probably in London around 1540 and likely a pupil of Thomas Tallis, he became organist of Lincoln Cathedral in 1563 at little more than twenty, and in 1572 was sworn a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, where he served as organist alongside his old master.

In 1575 Queen Elizabeth I granted Byrd and Tallis a remarkable privilege: a monopoly on the printing of music and ruled music-paper in England, the first such patent in the country. Their joint Cantiones Sacrae of that year, dedicated to the Queen, was the patent’s first fruit. It was an extraordinary mark of royal favour — the more so because Byrd was, increasingly openly, a Roman Catholic in a Protestant state.

The recusant at court

Byrd’s Catholicism is the great tension of his life. He and his wife appear on the recusancy lists — those fined for refusing to attend Anglican services — from the 1570s and 1580s, and in 1594 he withdrew to Stondon Massey in Essex, near the homes of the Catholic gentry he served. There he wrote his boldest music: three Mass settings (1592-95), printed without title pages so they could pass quietly into the hands of those who needed them, and the two great books of the Gradualia (1605, 1607), a complete cycle of music for the proscribed Latin liturgy. That a known recusant could keep his court place through it all is testimony both to the Queen’s protection and to how indispensable his genius was.

His standing among his contemporaries was unmatched. In 1622 the writer Henry Peacham, in The Compleat Gentleman, named Byrd “our Phoenix” and called his sacred music “meere Angelicall and Diuine.” No higher praise was on offer.

The keyboard

For all the weight of his church music, Byrd’s place in this library rests on the keyboard. He took the virginal — the small domestic harpsichord of Tudor England — and made it the vehicle of a serious composer’s imagination, writing pavans and galliards of unrivalled gravity, grounds, dances, fantasias, and the variation set on a popular tune, a form he effectively created. Pieces like The Carman’s Whistle and Walsingham take a ballad off the street and transform it through ever-richer figuration.

The chief monument is My Ladye Nevells Booke of 1591 — forty-two pieces copied for a noblewoman under Byrd’s own supervision — and his music fills the later Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, the great anthology of the school. Eight of his pieces also appeared in Parthenia (c.1612-13), the first printed English virginal music, beside Bull and the young Orlando Gibbons, whose generation he had taught how to write for the keyboard.

Byrd died at Stondon Massey on 4 July 1623, past eighty. The Chapel Royal cheque-book recorded the loss in a phrase given to no one else: he was, it wrote, “a Father of Musick.” A century and a half later William Boyce gathered Byrd’s anthems into his Cathedral Music, keeping the old master’s name alive in the English choir stalls where it has never since fallen silent.